More Contradictions from the Party of Less Government

[greyl]

All hell is breaking loose on Wall Street, and one of the more subtle things the crisis has exposed is a growing ideological rift in the Republican Party that's starting to border on intellectual incoherence.

Wanting It Both Ways

The traditional small government, "hands off" wing has always argued for minimal regulation and healthy dollops of personal responsibility. This line of thinking suggests that the appropriate response to the Lehman collapse is for investors and executives to exercise more caution in the future. That's how markets work.

Yet there's now a competing populist strand of the party that seeks to protect the "little guy" against greed and incompetence. John McCain was quoted in the New York Times earlier this week as saying that our economy has been put at risk "because of the greed by some based in Wall Street and we have got to fix it."

The problem is that you can't simultaneously embrace markets and personal responsibility and then, when those markets have a car wreck, argue that it's the government's job to protect us against rapacious Wall Street traders.

Much more...